As a business owner, it is essential that you manage your cash flow and maximize your profit margins while maintaining the integrity of your business. Although that is something most business owners understand and strive to accomplish—it is not always something business owners understand how to achieve.
Maybe you start second-guessing your earnings and margins while evaluating your P&L statements each month. While crunching the numbers you start wondering why your margins aren’t as high as you’d like them to be and where the holes are that are leaking your hard earned cash. Maybe you are at the point when you realize there has to be another way to maximize your spends and increase profits. Maybe there is something you’re missing when you evaluate your business. You need to find and patch those money-draining holes. If this resonates, there is a good chance your business may be losing money in ways you don’t even realize. The following are three big problems that could be causing your business to lose money, and three easy fixes that will help you plug those holes.
1. Too many meetings Ever feel like you are stuck in meetings about meetings and accomplishing less and less while you watch the day slip away? If so, you aren’t alone. According to one study, 60 percent of executives complained about time wasted in meetings, and 74 percent doubted their meetings were effective. It’s time to evaluate the content and efficiency of your meetings and do something about it.
Solution: Replace or shorten meetings by distributing information through cloud services that allow employees to share files and folders online. Removing the need to physically meet will save time and streamline communication.
2. The cost of filing Are you still stuck in the paper-filing era? Having paper piles and filing cabinets full of paper documents could be costing your money. Believe it or not, storing paper documents is expensive. The space cost of one standard filing cabinet is over $70 per year—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The approximate cost to operate and own a standard filing cabinet for one year is outlined below:
|
Space (at $9.95 per square foot) |
$70.65 |
|
Supplies |
$98.00 |
|
Cabinet cost (depreciated over 10 years) |
$32.05 |
|
Pay for file clerk (per month) |
$1,733.00 |
|
Employer cost (25 percent) |
$433.25 |
|
Indirect costs – boxes, etc… |
$236.69 |
|
TOTAL |
$2603.64 |
Solution: Keep documents organized and backed up online for more efficient document storage and retrieval.
3. Too much paper The average office worker uses over 10,000 sheets of paper per year, equaling about $80 per employee. Plus, there are additional costs throughout a paper’s lifecycle, including:
- Copying
- Shipping
- Handling
- Storage
Solution: Convert paper documents to online digital files. Specifically, do this for billing, invoices, expense reporting, memos and whatever else you need to get off your desk and into the cloud. Use a smart organization system or another cloud storage solution to go digital and keep papers from cluttering your cash flow.
